One new feature found in the recent Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) release is a nice Gnome desktop notification provided by a tool called Palimpsest Disk Utility that interrogates SMART drive information.
Upon upgrading from Intrepid to Karmic last November, I was presented with a new notification from this tool.
Upon clicking with my mouse I was presented with some startling facts about my current drive health that have me wondering when my disk is going to fail. The details below suggest my data is in jeopardy and that I should start to plan a disk replacement in the near future. Since I run a RAID-1 setup the failure should result in a 10 minute disk swap at my convenience, and I look at this as more of an experiment. At nearly three months since first detection (who knows how long the issue was there prior to Karmic), my pseudo-dead Hitachi is doing quite well.
I have known about this type of information for a number of years and periodically used smartmontools to interrogate drives that sound funny, have been accidentally run hot for extended periods of time or exhibit other signs of impending failure. This is great for servers, where events from rolled-up syslogs are filtered by tools like logwatch which pass on key data for system administrators to act on. On my laptop however I do not run this daemon, preferring one less process running in the background, slowing my startup if only to send me an email (if my configured exim is even within reach of an outbound smtp gateway) or dump a few lines in a syslog file or a console screenlet I only peek at when something is obviously wrong.
For the convenient notification now in Karmic, I am grateful; I am sure others will also have more respect for this subtle addition when the time for impending disk failure is upon them. In my business operations we are pretty much split evenly with a strong Windows tier (running XP through 7 depending on tolerance for re-installation and cost justification) and a growing Linux tier running Ubuntu (Karmic at this point in time). I sure hope Windows 7 has something similar, as there is a lot of pressure to get the most out of laptop hardware as businesses are recovering from the recession.
